It's Brits night today, which means that for one evening at least, the record industry can forget its problems – sales down 7% in the UK last year – and instead chose to pass out while Tinie Tempah and Rihanna duet, or whatever else is on offer by way of entertainment. It's an iTunes shuffle night all of its own, with ITV hoping that its viewers will stomach Take That (easy) but also Mumford and Sons and Arcade Fire. And everybody who's there will go away cheerfully confused, particularly those who head on to the aftershow entertainment on offer from Mark Ronson's Warchild gig at the O2 or with the suits from Universal at the Savoy.

Universal, the market leader, doesn't report until 1 March, but is unlikely to significantly buck the trend – and even its UK boss David Joseph admitted that 2010 was a "horror movie" in a Media Guardian interview this Monday because the company had failed to break any new acts last year. (A high proportion of Universal's best new stuff is comes out of the UK – think Amy Winehouse, Duffy etc.) Meanwhile, EMI is private and usually in a mess, and while insiders say its smaller publishing division, which represents songwriters is holding up at least, an EMI well-wisher has sent over a spreadsheet to show that revenues (in dollar terms) are down by 36.45% since 2004.

Well, we've all got the idea by now. And for some, maybe it doesn't really matter – there's no shortage of great music around, not least the rise of grime as a chart force, which keeps the kids in my son's inner-city primary school singing. But in the long term, we ought to care (a little tiny bit) as to how record companies are faring because it's not obvious that the live business – which caters well for well-known, well-worn stadium acts – and the Cowell business can pick up all the slack. Somebody has to help out with the difficult business of artist discovery – where else, say, would artists like Jessie J (you gotta like her) come from?

Serious students of music industry financials might, then, turn to Pandora – the US answer to Spotify – which has knocking for 80m registered users. Pandora wants to go public, so you can read all about its business on the US Securities and Exchange Commission website. The summary though, is that Pandora generated $89.3m of revenues in the first nine months of its 2010 financial year, compared with $70.6m in the whole of last year – which equates to an unusual music industry concept called growth. For the moment 86% of its revenues are from advertising, but the company is trying to expand an all-you-can-listen monthly subscription service, which turned over $12m so far in 2010.

Pandora doesn't yet amount to a new business model for the music industry; it's too small for that yet. More realistically it adds up to a very large radio station, because so much of its income is from advertising. But it is a start of sorts, and at least Pandora paid out $45m to record companies in 'content acquisition' – a rather high proportion of total revenues given that your typical radio station only pays out about 10% of its revenues in royalties. No doubt that proportion will fall, but in an industry suffering from serious declines in unit sales, companies like Pandora show there is still ... dare one say it ... a bit of hope. And the music industry certainly needs that.